Google Says Search is Tough, Regulators Should Keep Out Of It

In a very well written post, a Google employee, or Googler if you would like to call them that, Amit Singhal, wrote a pretty strong worded post against regulators butting in on regulating how search engines rank results for queries.

The opening statement in itself blew me away, and made me understand what and how people who want to regulate search have gotten it wrong, take a look at it yourself.

Pop quiz. Get ready. You’re only going to have a few milliseconds to answer this question, so look sharp. Here goes: "know the way to San Jose?" Now display the answer on a screen that’s about 14 inches wide and 12 inches tall. Find the answer from among billions and billions of documents. Wait a second – is this for directions or are we talking about the song? Too late. Just find the answer and display it. Now on to the next question. Because you’ll have to answer hundreds of millions each day to do well at this test. And in case you find yourself getting too good at it, don’t worry: at least 20% of those questions you get every day you’ll have never seen before. Sound hard? Welcome to the wild world of search at Google. More specifically, welcome to the world of ranking.

Now, this in itself does not say that how search engine rank results, but it definitely says that when you want to get a needle out of a haystack, you need to look into the right places, or you would never find the needle. Also another interesting thing this throws up is that the needle in the haystack may get throw out with the hay itself if search regulators decide to regulate how search engines work and then put the onus on us normal human beings without an algorithm to figure out and search carefully.

To be frank, I have been a a Google search user from the time since I have started using Internet, 90% of the time I have found solutions for my problems within the first three or four pages of the search results. For the other 10%, I have had to tweak my searches quite a bit, but I did get to a solution nevertheless.

Now imagine with search engine regulators I would have to reverse the scenario, that is 90% of the times I would have to tweak my search queries and refine them till I find the correct results. I certainly do not want that for any search engines including Google and Bing, keep the search regulators out, be it EU or anyone else.